CodyTalks at the...140 conference smalltown 2011

CodyTalks at the...140 conference NYC 2011

"How the Internet is like a Small Town"...Twitter is coffee shop of the world... the whole world can now know about the good or bad thing you did just like it's always happened at the small town coffee shop.

OK Quick Tech Moment... Mahalo.com

I don't know how many of you will care about this. Scott will for sure and I bet he has an argument for me... Mitchell will cause I think I know his opinion already.

Ok very short version. Jason Calacanis(I think it's funny that click takes you to wikipedia) created Mahalo.com. It's a human powered search engine. There are actually quite a few of them out there. I don't expect most of my readers to know or care, cause this just isn't that type of blog.

Anyhow I ignored Mahalo because I thought they were ignorant to go up against wikipedia. I followed Calacanis on twitter cause people I respected followed him. He annoyed me on twitter so I gave Mahalo even less of a chance. Until.. a couple of days ago I decided to give it a chance. Dont know why, that doesn't matter, I tried it so you didn't have to be the guinea pig. And... I completely changed my tune.

It's better than Wikipedia because if it doesn't have anything about what you are searching for it helps look in other places! Wow for as egotistical as Calacanis seems on his blog and twitter, he produced a humble search engine.

Also if you questioned human powered search. Just give Mahalo or Wikipedia a try. 9 times out of ten your results and info are much easier to deicpher and filter through. Google will always have it's place in search but in the long run human powered/editted search will win out.

Try Mahalo and let me know what you think. Or don't, but don't be upset when your kids make fun of you for not using it in a couple of years.

9 comments:

Ok, Cody, I went to the Hawaiian search engine thing you sent me to and I don't get it. I searched for a handful of things and none of them had a page in their engine. It's just the same results I would get from Google. So, it's the same info I get somewhere else and just another format I would have to learn. What's special about this?

I ask this as a dwarf in understanding this techno world. Teach me oh Yoda 2.0.

Along the same lines, what does your man Jason C. do exactly? I followed your links and a few others and I still wasn't clear. I'm interpreting his job as a blogger like the old school radio station salesman - because the only income he generates is from advertising? (He's not a programmer right?) So, he gets in fights and depends on advertising dollars. Please help me understand...

(Have advertisers really seen income generated from posting advertisements on sites? This just isn't in my reality.)

Along comes Kate with 14 questions slammed into one little comment....

1. Mahalo is different (Special is subjective, different is factual) from Google because it is human-powered and edited. A real human being takes the time to create a page with all sorts of pertinent info about the subject. I like the human touch cause it is harder for spammers and stupid directories to get in the search results. This is similar to wikipedia. But... The problem with wikipedia is this, if you search it for something that it doesn't have a page for, you hit a dead end. If you search Mahalo for something that a human powered page hasn't been created for yet... It helps you very quickly get back to the world of algorithm powered search and go that route. It may not be better than Google now, maybe never, but it is better in my mind than wikipedia because it doesn't dead end you. More fun to look at than wikipedia too!!

Jason C. was originally a first round dot com guy and now really he is an idea man and a Venture Capitalist I think. Don't think he really needs money but yes he does get in some fights and generate pub. that way.

OK Kate, you are too young to be posting this last question. According to the IAB online ad revenue exceeded the $21 Billion mark in 2007. And could break 40 billion in 2008.

Yes lot's and lot's of advertisers are really seeing revenue generated from online ad postings. No way that number gets that big without a fair amount of success.

Ok. I got it - I think. I am amazed by the career stories of folks like Mr. C. Making big dollars for what feels like generating nothing amazes me. There are lots of folks who do it.

I have real respect for the creative types that produce "real" things like programming and websites. Tat there is a professional blogger, who is not a professional journalist, making big bucks for just their opinion befuddles my mind. It's like the NextGen of Dear Abby...if only she had been a blogger.

I totally understand that huge dollar amounts are being generated for bloggers, websites, etc through advertising. I don't understand and haven't heard the numbers on trackable spending for real goods from internet advertising.

(I should ask my father about these numbers - his PhD is in mass communication and advertising and he did some of his studies on the internet's impact on traditional radio.)

Anecdotally, I don't experience internet advertising that I don't actively try to avoid. I hate sites covered in ads and close anything that pops up. I do go to retail sites of companies I am already familiar with for any on-line shopping. I can't think of a single on-line ad that has prompted me to actually spend money. Am I just that different from the rest of the internet using public?

Thank you gracious Yoda 2.0, I am more open to Mahalo after your wise words and might agree that it may have a more useful future.

I played with mahalo a little bit. I don't really like it. I feel like there's a lot of extra crap on all the pages. It doesn't feel like a web search. Maybe because I spend so much time using the Internet, I don't really get caught by the spam or other stuff in my results. I think my other problem is: I search for a lot of technical crap. Mahalo doesn't like it when i search for 'actionscript sharedobject two files.'

However, in your defense, I just don't get into this user-generated phenomenon at all. I thought twitter was the worst thing I've ever seen. I never had a myspace page. I have a facebook page that I never check. The only people who add me are people I knew in high school who I don't really want telling me "we should have a beer sometime" and my cousins, who I don't really socialize with outside of family stuff. The only real social networking type thing I use is Flickr, and that's just so I can show my photos to friends and family. I never get comments or favorited. Maybe I'm just over the hill and my unborn future children will think I'm as pathetic as my old man who quit using computers around the time Windows hit the scene.

Also, I'm not sure I see what's so wrong with wikipedia. Other than the obvious credibility issues (which i think are pretty small on most everything that's not recent/divisive), I don't have a big problem with it. I rarely hit a dead end, and if I do, I just go to google.

Anyway, like twitter, I will give this a little more time. If I have some more "regular" searches, I'll try to remember to try mahalo before google and see how it goes.

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Testimonials

I have been part of several programs with Cody, and have found that he presents high quality content in a personal, down-to-earth way that is extremely effective. Highly recommend him!Ron Wilson - Director
Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development